VOLUME 166, ISSUE 2 JANUARY 2018

Digital wallets, such as ApplePay and Google Pay, are smart payment devices that can integrate payments with two‐way, realtime communications of any type of data. Integration of payments with realtime communications holds out tremendous promise for consumers and merchants alike: the combination, in a single, convenient platform, of search functions, advertising, payment, shipping, customer service, and loyalty programs. Such an integrated retail platform offers consumers a faster and easier way to transact, and offers brick‐and‐mortar retailers an eCommerce‐type ability to identify, attract, and retain customers. At the same time, however, digital wallets present materially different risks for both consumers and merchants than traditional plastic card payments precisely because of their smart nature.

For consumers, digital wallets can trigger an unfavorable shift in the applicable legal regime governing the transactions, increase fraud risk, create confusion regarding error resolution, expose consumers to non–FDIC‐insured accounts, and substantially erode transactional privacy. These risks are often not salient to consumers, who thus cannot distinguish between different digital wallets on the basis of risk. Consumers’ inability to protect against these risks points to a need for regulatory intervention by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau to ensure minimum standards for digital wallets.

For merchants, digital wallets can divest valuable customer information used for antifraud, advertising, loyalty, and customer service purposes. Digital wallets can also facilitate poaching of customers by competitors, impair merchants’ customer relationship management, deprive merchants of influence over consumers’ payment choice and routing, increase fraud risk, subject merchants to patent infringement liability, and ultimately increase the costs of accepting payments. Merchants are constrained in their ability to refuse or condition payments from digital wallets based on the risks presented because of merchant rules promulgated by credit card networks. These rules raise antitrust concerns because they foreclose entry to those digital wallets that offer merchants the most attractive valuation proposition: wallets that do not use the credit card networks for payments.

This Article provides an account of Our Regionalism to supplement the many accounts of Our Federalism. After describing the legal forms regions assume in the United States—through interstate cooperation, organization of federal administrative agencies, and hybrid state–federal efforts—it explores how regions have shaped American governance across the twentieth and early twenty‐first centuries.

In the years leading up to the New Deal, commentators invoked regions to resist centralization, arguing that state coordination could forestall expansion of the federal government. But regions were soon deployed to a different end, as the federal government relied on regional administration to develop its bureaucracy. Incorporating regional accommodations and regional organization into new programs allowed the federal government to expand its role in domestic policymaking. As interstate regionalism yielded to federal regionalism, the administrative state was propelled forward by a strategy that had arisen to resist it. Even as regions facilitated the expansion of the New Deal administrative state, however, the regional organization and argument that underpinned this development left room for state influence within federal programs and for new projects of multistate and joint state–federal governance. The century’s next regional moment brought this potential to the fore, with regions brokering the resurgence of the states in Great Society programs.

In the early twenty‐first century, new regional undertakings have been celebrated as fluid, nonhierarchical networks. Although the network metaphor has been exhausted, this characterization anticipates the emergence of “regionalism without regions”: collaborations among multiple state and federal actors that need not involve contiguous areas. Just as regional improvisation has responded to governance challenges of past decades, this nascent development responds to today’s polarized partisanship. It betokens both the revival and the transformation of the political sectionalism that has always informed American regionalism, even as it slipped behind an administrative veneer for much of the twentieth century.

For many decades now, copyright jurisprudence and scholarship have looked to the common law of torts—principally trespass and negligence—in order to understand copyright’s structure of entitlement and liability. This focus on property—and harm‐based torts—has altogether ignored an area of tort law with significant import for our understanding of copyright law: tortious interference with a prospective economic advantage. This Article develops an understanding of copyright law using tortious interference with a prospect as a homology. Tortious interference with a prospect allows a plaintiff to recover when a defendant’s volitional actions interfere with a potential economic benefit that was likely to accrue to the plaintiff prior to the defendant’s intervention. Premised on the idea of a probabilistic harm and driven by instrumental considerations, the tort works by treating a possible market benefit as the basis of an interest that is worthy of protection against specific behavior. As a supposed incentive for creativity, copyright law operates in ways that are strikingly similar to tortious interference with a prospect. Much like tortious interference with a prospect, it functions by first identifying a zone of probabilistic market benefits, and then protecting that zone against specific volitional interferences through a framework of liability. This Article unpacks the strong analytical and normative parallels between the two, and argues that their similarity sheds new and important light on several persistent puzzles within current copyright jurisprudence.